The mobile phone is fast becoming an all-encompassing, personal accessory for communication, entertainment, and personal finance. As the mobile phone becomes the ultimate wallet, as well as the keeper of sensitive personal information, securing it against theft and hacking will eventually become of paramount importance. To date, the primary concern for most users has been prevention of theft; mobile phones generally are easier to lose than wallets, because the mobile phone typically is utilized much more frequently. In recognition of this fact, many software and hardware mechanisms have been proposed or implemented to make it difficult for hackers to obtain sensitive information from stolen phones. Nevertheless, few, if any, of these schemes have been promising against hardcore hackers.
In addition, the main drawback of existing protection schemes is the requirement that users authenticate themselves to their mobile device, for example, by typing a password or personal identification number (PIN) code. This inconvenience causes many users to disable these security measures completely. Nonetheless, there currently are proposals to use biometrics, such as, fingerprints to replace passwords. These methods, however, have yet to prove themselves useful to typical users. Furthermore, there are several problems with biometrics. Firstly, since fingerprints are fairly easy to capture and forge, biometric readers can be deceived. Secondly, unlike passwords, existing biometrics generally rely on static and permanent data about a person, e.g., fingerprints and iris patterns; thus they can neither be renewed, nor replaced. Moreover, there is a growing concern that once a person's biometrics data has been misappropriated, the game is effectively over with regard to re-utilization of such stolen information.
The subject matter as claimed is directed toward resolving or at the very least mitigating, one or all the problems elucidated above.